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You can trade the cigarettes, vodka, half the meat and half the sugar in the black market to get more of everything else.

Worst part about rationing in most systems (including this one) is that you still have to pay for the rationed goods - so black market trading at a profit is difficult.

Which, one supposes, is half the point, after all.

And as an Indigenous person … my parents grew up with very little. But you could live for months if you had good supply of flour, lard, sugar and tea. There is even a drink we made called tea ploss where you just made really strong tea, then mixed in flour, lard and sugar to make a quick energy drink without much fuss in the cold wilderness. Supplement all that with wild food and you had a healthy long term diet.

Honestly sounds like the same basic idea behind pemmican. High calorie density foodstuffs like that astounded the Europeans when they started actually talking to the Native peoples in the Americas. Both pemmican and jerky were considered indispensable innovations, and such energy-dense foods are really underrated as indigenous American contributions to modernity.

That being said, as someone who doesn't like tea, lard, or even modern energy drinks, I think I'll pass on the tea ploss... XD

Well, look at you, still got vodka by the afternoon of the first day.

Unrationed. You'll be eating a lot of them in the coming months, most like...

In the vodka.

Growing in garden.

In Poland?

It's a commonly held belief that smoking is a cure for cancer.

Back in those days? A pack a day was not that uncommon.

They may not have been rationed (ie one could buy them as long as they had the money and the patience). This only shows rationed items.

For cups of tea? Probably.

For baking and making wine and spirits? Probably not.

It was still part of the Eastern communist bloc / Soviet Union "satellite states" at that time.

What shocks me is there being more sugar than flour.

Economic mismanagement.